Evan Almighty (2007)

Evan Almighty Synopsis

Newly elected to Congress, Evan leaves Buffalo behind and shepherds his family to suburban northern Virginia. Once there, his life gets turned upside-down when God (Morgan Freeman) appears and mysteriously commands him to build an ark. But his befuddled family just can't decide whether Evan is having an extraordinary mid-life crisis or is truly onto something of Biblical proportions...

If someone told me they were making a sequel to Bruce Almighty without Jim Carrey, there's no way I'd be interested. But tell me you're making a movie in which Steve Carell is commanded by God to build an ark, and you can count me in. Most of the time nothing spells certain doom better than a sequel made without the original star. But Evan Almighty might be a rare exception. Trading Jim Carrey for Steve Carell is not necessarily a step down. It’s a lateral move in a different direction.

If they’d brought back Jim Carrey to repeat the same shlock from the first film, or if they’d had Steve Carell stuck in exactly the same situation Jim was in the first movie, I’d be out on this one. Instead, they really seem to be trying to build on the original premise to come up with something new… and potentially even funnier.

That's the Evan Almighty on display in the movie's trailers. Steve Carell being forced to build an ark to save people from a global flood is every bit as funny as you'd think it would be. And let's face it, if Morgan Freeman were actually God the world's churches would be a lot more full.

With the exception of two Ace Ventura movies, Jim Carrey has actually been able to spend most of his career avoiding really terrible sequels. Movies like Dumb and Dumber, The Mask and Bruce Almighty were all given the sequel treatment, but Carrey, not wanting to soil material that he liked being a part of, decided not to be involved.